I found the answer to the problem, after hours of research and testing.

1. I deleted all cookies linked to localhost/myphpadmin.2. I clear Cached Web Content.3. On the Terminal.app I changed permissions in the following way : sudo chmod -R 4777 /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/include/php/ext/session4. In the php.ini file I uncommented the session.save_path = "/tmp" and removed the "/tmp" and replaced with session.save_path = "/Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/include/php/ext/session".5. In the config.inc.php I changed the following:

I had a similar problem, getting a "can't start session error" when attempting to access phpMyAdmin. That problem is "totally" resolved by un-commenting session.save_path in php.ini (See my post on this issue). This is obviously a bug in the download file set. However, if you search the distribution you will find many references to "/tmp". This is very bad joss. There should be a global variable that gets loaded that resolves where all php bits write temporary objects. The OS X XAMPP distribution contains a "temp" folder and some session stuff is being written there. If the intent of the XAMPP developers (I can't read their minds) is to encapsulate /tmp functionality within the XAMPP tree, then they should clean up all these references to /tmp, which in OS X is a public directory symbolically linked to /private/tmp. If they don't, then every time you upgrade you will have to make this same change A public /tmp, where all server-side session data is kept is not good practice. So, private caching of temporary stuff is preferable, but XAMPP needs to do this consistently. I don't have time to search out all the instances but just knowing they had un-commented session.save_path tells me this issue is unresolved among the developers. I hope they are reading about all the flak 1.8.* installers are getting.